[Air-L] Change of default reply setting on air-l

[Christian Nelson]

On May 11, 2009, at 11:30 AM, Tuszynski, Stephanie wrote:

> Is it really that onerous a task to manually include the entire list  
> into your reply fields when you want to?

Obviously the answer is no. And it's not really necessary to cut and  
paste or rearrange the addresses, really, unless you have an  
extraordinary need to keep someone from getting more than one copy of  
a post.

But I don't think that's what the real issue is. Rather, I think that  
people have invested the "reply" and "reply-all" buttons in their  
email programs with particular meanings. (This particular example  
reminds me of what Reeves and Nass' report finding, in The Media  
Equation, regarding people's orientation to TVs. Among other things,  
they found that people who normally watched news on one TV and  
entertainment on another tended to treat news reports as more credible  
when received via the TV on which they most regularly watched the  
news.) Due in large part to previous experience, they have come to  
regard hitting reply-all to replying to a number of individuals and  
regard hitting reply to replying to a singular entity, whether one  
individual or a group.

Why should their present actions be driven so powerfully from past  
habit? Perhaps, as Langer's research suggests, this has a bit to do  
with our supposed cognitive miserliness and a concomitant desire to  
operate as mindlessly as possible. Perhaps, too, it has something to  
do with the power of ritual and the security it provides, as suggested  
by Durkheim and many who have followed.

That's my .02$ on the subject, anyway.

--Christian Nelson